Village`s Past Rooted In The Soil

At The Turn Of The Century, There Was Little But Farming

Back when progress and growth were synonymous-when bigger meant better-the area that is now Hoffman Estates was regressing.

``You know that old song `How ya gonna keep `em down on the farm?`

`` asks Marilyn Lind, who is writing a history of Schaumburg Township for the Schaumburg Township Public Library. ``Well, it really did happen that way here.``

The population, somewhere around 1,000 before the turn of the century, had dwindled to 869 by 1920. Hired hands began moving to the city, and farmers` sons returning from World War I turned their backs on the plows and went to pound city pavements looking for jobs.

``If you really wanted a job that would go somewhere, there was nothing in the township that would let you do that,`` Lind says. ``You were either a farmer or you weren`t.``

Lind has been gathering facts and following trends by reading local newspapers from 1900 on; she is up to 1921.

``There are a lot of silly things, like so-and-so who was sick and so-and-so who fell off his tractor,`` she says. ``But you also start to see huge numbers of farms in this area that are suddenly being auctioned off.``

The land was being bought by gentlemen farmers. Marshall Field IV owned one named Fieldale, which covered the area where the Hilldale Golf Course and residential area are today. Theatrical producer Arthur Hammerstein, uncle of songwriter Oscar Hammerstein II, bought the 165-acre Gieske farm in 1943 for $150 an acre.

``It was like a hobby, and this was their country place, and they would hire farm managers to run the farms,`` Lind says.

That land, which would eventually be coveted by developers, had been bought for $1.25 an acre by the first settlers. Some of them were New Englanders who started arriving in 1836.

From the settlement of Chicago they set off in search of fertile soil for farmland. They followed Indian trails that criss-crossed what is now Hoffman Estates. By then the paths had been abandoned by the Indians, who were forced west when they lost the Black Hawk War in 1832.

In the late 1970s, many Indian artifacts were uncovered by an archeological dig in Hoffman Estates sponsored by Northern Illinois University in De Kalb. ``We found arrowheads that go back as far as 2,500 years,`` says Lind, who participated in the dig.

The pioneers who followed the Indian trails must have had to slog through long muddy stretches between Salt Creek to the east and the watershed of Poplar Creek to the west.

``There were a lot of creeks, and there was a lot of flooding in the area when the spring thaws came or there were heavy rains,`` Lind says.

Undaunted, the settlers called it home. Those who first tried to tame the land elected Ebenezer Colby to represent them at the State Constitutional Convention at Springfield in 1847.

Lind, who teaches a summer social science class at Hoffman Estates High School, went to Springfield to search the minutes of the convention for Colby`s contributions. She found he was on a committee called

``Miscellaneous.`` He did take the floor near the end of the convention, though, to suggest that the constitution be printed in German as well as English.

In answer, someone said, ``Why not in Norwegian?`` and others asked for translations into French and Latin. Then ``somebody got up and said, `I`m sick and tired of all this nonsense, let`s get on with it,` `` Lind says.

Colby`s suggestion was shelved. His daughter, however, was later to make a more prominent place in history for herself. Myra Colby Bradwell was the first woman to pass the bar exam in Illinois, in 1869. She couldn`t practice law, however, because ``at that time-the 1860s and 70s-married women were not allowed to sign contracts, so she started publishing a law review,`` Lind says.

English-speaking settlers such as the Colbys were joined early on by several German families, including the Greves, who arrived in the mid-1830s by oxcart and settled on land called Wild Cat`s Grove. Today the land, at the intersection of Abbey Wood Drive and Queensberry Circle, is the site of the Greve Cemetery. It contains about eight family plots, and most of them are German families.

Johann Sunderlage came from Germany to what is now Hoffman Estates and married the Greves` daughter, Catherine. They lived in a dugout and then a log cabin until they had a sturdy farmhouse built for them in 1856.

In the 1850s the German immigrants began to outnumber English-speaking settlers. ``At that time Germany was drafting its young men into the army, and they didn`t want to go, so they left the country,`` Lind says.

Many of those Germans settled in the area that took the name Schaumburg Township in 1850. Its boundaries were the same as they are today: Central Road on the north, Rohlwing Road on the east, Devon Avenue on the south and Barrington Road on the west.

Some say the name Schaumburg was chosen because most of the immigrants came from that town in Germany. Lind, however, checked the census reports and discovered that most came from Hanover.